The Ecomm Analyst

When I take on a new store, the first week isn’t about ads. It’s about getting measurement to a point where decisions in week three aren’t built on garbage.

Here’s the checklist I work through, in order.

GA4 set up correctly with enhanced ecommerce events firing. This is the bare minimum. Most stores I inherit have GA4 installed but missing key events, double-firing purchases, or attached to the wrong property. Fix this first because every other tool you wire up will eventually be cross-referenced against it.

Shopify reporting access cleaned up. Make sure the right people have the right view, and that custom reports exist for product-level revenue, repeat purchase rate, and AOV by channel. The default Shopify reports are fine. The custom ones are where the work happens.

Klaviyo connected properly with UTM pass-through. UTMs on every email link, no exceptions. If you don’t have utm_medium=email on your flows, you can’t separate email from organic in any downstream tool.

Meta and Google ad accounts with proper conversion tracking. Server-side wherever possible. Conversions API for Meta, Enhanced Conversions for Google. iOS 14 cost us a lot of signal and getting the server-side piece right recovers some of it.

An attribution layer that sits across all channels. This is where I bring in ThoughtMetric. The point isn’t to replace what Meta or Klaviyo are telling me. It’s to have one place where every channel is being judged by the same rules, so I can answer “where is revenue actually coming from” without opening seven tabs and doing mental math.

A baseline dashboard for the operator. Revenue, orders, sessions, conversion rate, AOV, and a channel breakdown. Updated daily. Looking at the same six numbers every morning is how you start to see patterns.

I usually don’t touch ad strategy until this is running clean. It feels slow. Clients sometimes push back. But the alternative is making decisions on data you can’t trust, and that costs more than a week of setup.